The article is devoted to the characterisation and interpretation of the linguistic category of evaluation, its essence and main features on the basis of modern mass media texts. The ambiguity of scientists’ interpretation of the nature of evaluation as a complex multidimensional linguistic, cultural and linguistic-pragmatic phenomenon with a dual nature — linguistic and mental — requires us to consider the peculiarities of the linguistic category of evaluation as an axiological component of word semantics. We understand evaluation as the result of the speaker’s activity in relation to the subject of speech, which is verbally fixed in the sense of heterogeneous linguistic units united by evaluative semantics, expressing a positive or negative attitude towards it in accordance with the existing ideal model of the world and aiming to evoke the speaker’s predicted reaction in the addressee of the message. Evaluative values are expressed at all levels of language: lexical, syntactic and phonetic. Evaluation fulfils cognitive, communicative, pragmatic and linguistic-cultural functions; it forms the idea of values or anti-values. The set of values reflects the hierarchical scale in which the spiritual culture of a given society is represented. It is proved that the linguistic category of evaluation is a means of realising the positive or negative significance of the results of human activity for the satisfaction of their objectively determined needs and interests. It was found that evaluation, which is explicitly or implicitly linked to comparison, always contains subjective (modal evaluation framework) and objective (descriptive, attributive) components that interact with each other.